𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

The Office of Chancellor is something of a juggernaut in the British state, for he who holds the purse strings and knows when to tighten them wields a great deal of power. And they used to be men who knew the value of a pound and the danger of debt, building the nation’s fortunes with sense. But in the modern day, the chancellor has become something of a plaything for sloganeering ideologues, people who see the budget as a performance, not a duty.

Here are five of the worst offenders, the men and women who confused generosity with wisdom, and left Britain all the poorer for it.

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For many, Mr Sunak was the golden boy. He was the polished, well-spoken cleverclogs who could steady the ship and lead us back to shore. Coming from nowhere, the first many saw of him was the bright-eyed and chipper newcomer who stepped in for Boris at a national debate in the 2019 election.

But soon he was on our screens by the day. As the pandemic hit the country, Sunak was there to save us, but the consequences of his actions were dire. He mistook generosity for leadership and forked out debt as if it were monopoly money. Lockdown handouts, the furlough scheme and the “Eat Out to Help Out” program won him plaudits in the press, but the punishing price will be ours to pay for years to come.

He turned the proud Treasury virtue of thrift into the performance of compassion, and in doing so turned dependency into a national habit. Beneath the polish and the practised smile lay a simple truth: Sunak governed like a social democrat, just with better tailoring. The result is a Britain hooked on subsidy, drowning in tax, and led by a man who called himself prudent while spending like a pop star.

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A good soldier and a keenly intelligent man, Mr Healey was, however, a disastrous Chancellor. He loaded the saddlebags with the full weight of a socialist dogma that saw an already buckling economy break. Taxes throttled the middle class, and he all but smothered industry.

Inflation roared into double digits, unions ran the shop, and in 1976, he took out the begging bowl and went on bended knee to the International Monetary Fund, the national equivalent of pawning the family silver.

His famous promise to “squeeze the rich until the pips squeak” did little more than crush aspiration across the board. Whilst Healey was witty, formidable and patriotic, his policies made Britain the sick man of Europe. What we can perhaps thank him for is teaching a generation of Conservative chancellors precisely what not to do.

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Much has been written of Kwasi in the years following his rather brief occupancy of No. 11. Some of it is particularly mean. His tragedy was not born of ignorance but of arrogance, believing as he did that he could do in a weekend what Thatcher did in a decade. For all his faults, his instincts were noble: low tax, bold growth, supply-side revival.

But his execution was economic Russian roulette. Announcing a revolution without first loading the magazines of confidence, he spooked markets and doomed himself. In the years that followed, his allies argue that he was a great mind misused, undone by impatience and tone-deaf timing.

He wanted to unleash enterprise, but instead all he unleashed was chaos. The lesson has stuck with us: even good ideas need discipline. He left office to the backdrop of rising gilts, a warning to every would-be radical that vision is nothing without ballast.

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Already a master of disguise, Rachel Reeves swept into office after letting people know two cardinal truths: one that she had worked in a bank, and two that she wouldn’t raise taxes. Within weeks, the scales fell from our eyes and the country realised they may have been led down the garden path.

Ms Reeves speaks the language of responsibility, whilst she presides over the slow suffocation of enterprise, nationwide. Her Treasury is a temple to “fairness”, a word often teased out as a synonym for taxation. Every ambition in Britain is means-tested, regulated, subjected to rules, and taxed again just to be on the safe side.

She promises “stability”, which in practice means inertia, and continues in a bizarre crusade that so far has seen farmers, parents, pensioners and small business owners in her crosshairs. Her plans are built on confiscation, as she tries to convince herself of the same old Labour illusion: that prosperity can be planned by the very people who have never created it.

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